


Marat/Sade

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Canon-Atypical Hand Job, Canon-Typical Violence, Life is a cabaret old chum, M/M, incarceration, psychiatric hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 04:21:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12809508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: And Sophie Tucker will shit, I know/ To see her name get billed below/ Roxie Hart





	Marat/Sade

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is the name of the play, and later movie, of the same name The quote in the summary comes from the song, Roxie, from the musical, Chicago. The conceit of the two-faced mask is lifted from the movie, Amadeus.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Jesus wept. It would be horizontal stripes. You look, you imagine, like part of a municipal work. In the hateful uniform, you hold out your arms like a bird in flight, and then fold them sulkily over your chest. Screwing up your face, you frown grotesquely. Though, there’s no one there to see. You’re being held in Arkham for observation, but that’s a complete misnomer. No one looks at you. No one speaks to you. Here, there are no mirrors, so you can’t even frown back at yourself. Once, you stood in front of dressing room mirrors, three of you looking right back at you at once. If you stood at the right angle, the reflection in one mirror dipped into that in another, and you were wrapped up in yourself.  
Wrapped up in yourself. With a quirk of your lips, you roll your eyes a little. That’s showbiz.  
The better part of living, you’ve discovered, is treating everything like the theater. Tragedy is the curtain that divides life. Cuts it. Down the center. And after a time, you learn how to cut yourself in two. You learn what to keep backstage. Not everything belongs to the audience. The audience is big and it’s warm, and it’s beating with love, but it’s not very bright, and not everything is something it can understand. When you make something for the audience, it has to be as big on the outside as it was on the inside. Simply telling them that you’ve been injured isn’t enough. You must spray the blood on their faces. You must give them something undeniable. If nothing else, that is what you’ve done. Your pain is their pain, now. You’ve shared something. You’re very close to each other. Here, even if you were acknowledged, by the dead-eyed staff or your fellow inmates/patients, you don’t know any of these people, and you’re so far away from your life and everything you know that you’re sure that you must no longer be yourself. Without a mirror, how could you tell?  
Then, one day, you’re escorted from your cell to another small room, containing two chairs placed across from each other. The guard presses you into one, and you wait for the person belonging to the other chair. Through the bars. You see him. Panic flashes through you, as hot and wet as blood: how will Jim recognize you with a different face? It’s as though you’re wearing a mask, one that you cannot take off, and only remember when you think about how much the world has changed. Jim will probably not have been informed that you’re appearing in a new production. It’s not one you wrote yourself, so even you aren’t sure of what will happen. That’s what makes it exciting, yes? The marrow in the bone of acting is improvisation.  
He dismisses the guards. Suddenly, you’re shy. “Jimmy,” you say, your eyes slipping down. You feel the mask struggle and fail not to smile. The lips pucker. The skin around the mouth itches. Slowly, the teeth are bared. “Now, what brings you to my little corner of Purgatorio?”  
He speaks. Do you listen? Do you hear? No, you dream. Your lines begin to come to you. When you speak, you hear another’s voice. You do know the origins of theater, do you not?  
“You do know the origins of theater, do you not?”  
For a moment, Jim is blank. The features remain, but they grasp no feeling, no thought. Then, you know: he’s yours to fill and direct. You’re so glad to be sitting down. Otherwise, your knees would buckle. Like a penitent, you’d drop to the floor. Your mouth alive, snapping at divine ether.  
Finally, Jim says, “What?”  
Smile. “Western theater began as religious rites in ancient Greece, for the god Dionysos.” When Jim says nothing, you continue: “The actors embodied the gods, for the purpose of taking the audience members out of their lives and into the eternal.” Still, Jim is silent. “In vicariously living the divine, ordinary people were purged of their mortal baseness. So, you see, Jim, you can’t separate performance from ritual, from purification.”  
He looks at you. Somewhat sadly, you think. You want to comfort him, but you have to wait. First, he has to deliver his lines. Once he speaks, you’ll know what he needs. “What are you talking about?”  
The gods brush their fingers over your brain and tongue. You speak. “We made something together, you and I. Together, we brought the city catharsis, and we relieved it of some of its anguish, its sins. If I must now be sacrificed to make that scourging complete, then so be it. It’s a burden that you know well.”  
“What?” Poor Jim. He isn’t given much to work with, is he? Still, he acquits himself admirably.  
You sigh in sympathy. “The sins of Gotham are your sins. So, now, finally, I understand.” And in saying it, you do. “You didn’t want to share.” You lean forward, and pat his knee. He looks at you as though you’d struck him.  
“You’re out of your mind,” he says. It’s not accusatory. It’s shocked. What an interesting choice.  
“It’s all right,” you tell him. The mask opens its eyes a little bit wider. You let your hand rest on his knee.  
“Get your hand off of me.”  
You roll your eyes, retract your hand, hold it in your lap.  
“I need to know who on the inside was working with you,” he says. His voice is rougher, now. You can almost feel the ache in his throat. How hot it must be in that head, with all of that friction. It’s like a lantern, burning to make light. Or like a furnace, raging away. You want to soothe him. Pull his hot head with your cool hands into your lap like marble. Your flesh claps with the cold of the sepulchre.  
“Who was working with me?”  
“Yes,” he says wearily, as though he already knows the answer to the question, “The crime scenes were always totally clean.”  
“Well, cleanliness is next to godliness,” you say.  
It’s not even a surprise when he strikes you. Everyone knows about his filthy temper. It’s a celebrity, in its own right. Look- you’re seeing stars!  
“There wasn’t a trace of forensic evidence,” he continues, “Which tells me that you had help. Someone who knew what we’d be looking for, and how to get rid of it.”  
You hold your hand to your cheek, look at the ceiling. “Hurt my flesh all you want, but don’t injure my pride. What makes you think that I’m not simply a student of the detective’s trade?”  
“You’re crazy.”  
“Maybe so, but I’m not stupid. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”  
“No,” he shakes his head, “I know you had help.”  
“Such conviction.”  
You let him pull you up out of your chair. You have to be generous with your partner. You have to give them something. Pedaling your legs backwards, you help him push you past your chair (it wheels to the side on one leg, but pleasingly, doesn’t fall), up to and against the wall. He’s about the same size as you, and slighter than you are, so it does beggar belief a bit that he could manage you with such confidence, but art isn’t about reality; it’s about fantasy.  
“The guards could walk in at any time,” you say, soft voice from a grinning mask, “Or did you pay them off to stay away?”  
His face relaxes. Then, his grip. He was dreaming, and you’ve awakened him.  
“Did you pay them to look the other way, so that we could be all alone?”  
Understanding washes over him, and he sneers at you. “You’re disgusting.”  
“You have a reputation, Jim.” Barbara Kean, and Oswald Cobblepot. The disgraced police captain, and the viral fiancée. The man in the glass tower with his gladiatorial contests. The commissioned murders. The near-suicidal moves against the rich and powerful. The naked sadism toward common thugs. The hatred of his fellow officers.  
He punches your jaw. Just a jab. A rebuke, and a half-hearted one. You say: “Now, hitting me isn’t the way to convince me that the rumors have no merit.”  
A gift from the heavens. He hits you again. Your vision dances. The mask bristles with little needles of pain. Tomorrow, there will be bruises. If you don’t see them, though, they don’t exist. You look at him. He’s breathing heavily from the effort of holding you against the wall, though you’ve made no attempt to get away from him. Pupils like spots of ink, eroding the pale irises of his eyes. He gets out an annoyed little huff just before you crush your mouth against his. For a moment, he does nothing. Your eyes have closed, but you fancy that his remain open, gazing into something that only he can see. Your hands are clawed in his jacket, and his body is solid and warm against yours. He’s the stage, and he’s the prop, and he’s the audience, too. He’s your partner, and when he pushes you away, hits you again, reels back, grimacing and wiping his mouth, you bend obligingly at the waist. You sag like a doll, and let him pick you up again. What will he say? What will he do? You feel, suddenly, very close to him, very protective.  
“Tell me,” he snarls, sounding, now, helpless.  
You’ll have mercy on him. “Hit me again, and I will.”  
His mouth opens, but no sound emerges. “This is sick,” he says finally, almost in a whisper.  
“This is a sick house, is it not,” you say, “a place for the sick at heart? Tell me, do you feel at home here?”  
“Tell me,” he says again.  
“A man in a mask,” you say. It frowns.  
“You’re lying.”  
“A man in a mask came to me, and told me that I would be revenged upon the GCPD if only I would do as he said.”  
“No,” Jim says, shakes his head, “It wasn’t him.”  
“Oh? So, who was it, then?”  
“It was Sofia Falcone.”  
It smiles. “Who’s that?”  
Now, he does hit you. New, bright pain settles over the muddled, darkening old pain. Fireworks in the night sky. The taste of blood filling your mouth can no longer be ignored. You turn your head and spit. You wipe your mouth across a black stripe on your sleeve. You’re imprecise, and a streak of carmine pollutes the stripe of white. “Oh, you must mean the gentle lady at the dinner party you interrupted. Well, I suppose that she could have disguised her appearance, disguised her voice...”  
“That’s not good enough.”  
You look at the ceiling. “My friend told me that certain parties were not be touched. That my vengeance was to play out on the body of the police force, not on significant individuals. There were plans larger than my own spinning beneath the heavens, and I would be permitted to toil, as long as I didn’t disturb them.”  
“How did he find you?” Jim asks, now quietly.  
You find, now, that you want to be quiet, too. “He must have known of me, I think, from police files. Some time ago, I suffered a loss. One of your fellows notified me of the fact.”  
“Who did you lose?”  
The mask frowns, as though it tastes something bad with its celluloid tongue. “Some little person, of no consequence. A terrible accidental encounter, unavoidable, I was sure, which remained unsolved. What my friend told me, though, which I now believe, is that there are no accidents in Gotham. The malefactor was known to the GCPD, and without a thought, they covered up the identity in order to protect their interests. There were others, of course. Other protected criminals, other victims. So many others. Oh, what terrible knowledge. How I wept. Slowly, though, I came to realize that none of this matters,” you laugh, though you don’t actually find this amusing, “If one person didn’t matter, none of them did. Not your colleagues, certainly. Not any of the other people I killed. After a time, I understood, that not even I truly mattered, to myself.” Again, you laugh, and it dislodges the mask. It slips from your face, and falls to the floor. You sigh. You smile in resignation. “Our lives are nothing to you, Jim.”  
Is he sifting his recollections? Does he happen upon something meaningful? You don’t know. He suffers you to fall against him. How tired you are. Your wounds aren’t healing properly. The bandages continue to show crusts of rust and amber. At night, you think that you can feel the surgical staples burrowing deeper into your flesh. This whole body is nothing but a costume, and a poorly-made one. Soon, it must fall to pieces. Your head is agitated liquid. Your limbs ache. What a piece of work is man.  
He suffers you to kiss him again. Sex is the last thing on your mind, but it’s not unwelcome when he turns you around, your hands moving out to brace against the wall, and slips a hot hand into your uniform. Dreamily, you smile.  
“What kind of mask?” he asks.  
“It was two-faced; the mask of tragedy on one face, and the mask of comedy on the other.”  
“Where did he find you?” He’s touching you, now. Arousal brushes into the room as an after-thought.  
“At the theater, where I worked.” That seems so very long ago, now. All but crushed and suffocated among the trash of all that you’ve done. A fang of glass or porcelain that leaps, now, out of the insulation of space and time to cut you. You bleed. You thought you’d lost the ability. You remember your life, before, and before. You remember like a ghost, a revenant. A dead thing that looks alive, but is most assuredly dead.  
“Who did he tell you to kill?”  
“Little people, he said. Anyone who got in my way. Your partner, if the spirit moved me. I wasn’t to damage you, though, or Oswald Cobblepot, or Sofia Falcone.”  
“Why?” His breath hits your ear. You feel the weight of his body against you. You can smell his cologne. You let your head fall back.  
“Why?”  
“Why did he want you to do this?” Jim hisses.  
“That, he never said. I’d imagine that if he had told me, he would have to have killed me,” you laugh. You swallow. Your head falls forward. You look down, at Jim’s hand on you. Your mouth falls open around a stupid, rubbery sound. “I think, now, that he must have been a madman. And don’t they all have the same motive, in the end?”  
Jim says nothing. He permits you your release, which is sweetly wrenching. As you catch your breath, he stays as he is. A burden that you would dislodge, and easily, if not for the pleasure that being encumbered brings. You can feel him breathing. You think you can feel his heart.  
But then, you’re wretchedly free. He helps you to clean yourself up and straighten your clothes. You feel like his creation, something he’s expelled into the world. You sit in your chair. He paces for a while, not speaking, not looking at you. A member of the audience, now, you feel such relief at merely watching. You think that you may just watch from now on.  
After a time, the guards come, nervous in their studied indifference. They look at him. He looks at them. No one looks at you. One takes his place at either side of you, and they raise you from your chair. You look at Jim. He looks at you. His face unreadable, he turns away.  
Exeunt omnes.  
Applause.


End file.
